Technical Difficulties

The point of this brief post is to apologize to anyone who tried to access my blog over the last week or so and ran into technical difficulties. The service that hosts my site migrated it to a new platform just over a week ago, and that’s where the problems began.

Thankfully, my friend Rob Treskillard – who did the neat graphics on the site and set it up in the first place – was able to fix the problems and now it should be accessible to everyone again.

To any who’ve been following my little updates on my progress will notice that my graph tracking progress on my new book has inched a little bit forward. I’m about ten pages shy of hitting 60%, and moving steadily onward. I’m beginning to get that happy feeling of having crested the midpoint and moving into the second half of the story, which for me is always enjoyable since that’s where much of the work of setting up story lines and characters starts paying off to an ever increasing degree.

Dear Mr. Graham
In this third of comments (the other two are in “The Joraiem Factor”), I would like to make a comment not relating to the post.
First, let me say that I LOVE YOUR SERIES LIKE THE BEJEEBIES!!!!! It is the best book series I have ever read, by far (although I kind of dislike it when I ask myself reading each chapter, “Wonder who’s going to die next?”).
I’m just going to briefly make my overview of the series:
Beyond the Summerland: Worst book of the series. Because (and only because) it is, from a writer’s stand-point, a romantic novel. Let me explain myself. What is the story goal of the book? To save Wylla. Since it is to get the girl (Wylla), the category is romance. Don’t like that first four or so chapters (Aleta and Alina, etc.). Personally, ‘romance’ is a thing that should be really minimized in a novel that is not entirely set to that end (which means it’s a novel I wouldn’t read). So, it’s a good book, but the romance was strange. I can understand, however, looking back, why you put it in. Maybe not to make it ‘romantic’, but because it served the story.
Other four books: AWESOME BEYOND ALL MANUSCRIPTAL RECKONING!!!!! (know that’s not a word, but anyway). A little bit gory, but then, so am I. Oh well. And I understood, but was still sad, that so many characters died. The worst, in my opinion, was Pedraal (or was it Pedraan who died? Always got ’em confused. Glad you gave them the hammer/axe configuration to differentiate). Or maybe it was Koshti. Either way. Liked the way you ended it (except, of course, Benjiah’s ‘girlfriend’. And doesn’t it say that “They shall not be married or given in marriage?”).
I knew Rulalin was comin’ back as a good guy. It was too classic for him not to. Kinda sad too when he died. Unexpected.
And that’s a good way to describe the series. From Joraiem’s death to Synoki being Malek to the very ending, it was all unexpected, but yet, brilliantly put together (like one of those several thousand piece puzzles). That’s the sort of book I like, and the sort I’m trying to write.

Thank you for a stupendous work of genius, (but on that next one, please leave out the romance if possible)
ES

Sorry the romance detracted from the story for you. I don’t think I ever said of Kirthanin that there’d be no ‘giving or taking in marriage’ when the world was remade. It’s a fictional world, so I took some liberties making the ‘new earth’ a little different then perhaps it’s going to be in this world…

Found this really great high-school level curriculum called “The One Year Adventure Novel”. Basically, you watch the video, and either answer questions or work on an outline or put words on paper. It creates a nice novel outline and teaches you a lot about how novels are put together. (Like, for example, that the almost the entire first BotB was technically before the story opened: the Inciting Incident was the death of.. well, we won’t say who. My friend hated me because I sort of told him who died. Oops.) It is a really good curriculum.

I am almost finished with book #1 on the curriculum (3,000 more words or one chapter!). It has turned out supertastically because of OYAN! Just thought I’d give some help to other people trying to write out there: